The establishment of the Free Derry Museum in Northern Ireland by the Bloody Sunday Trust was done so with the explicit intention of sharing the story of Bloody Sunday from the local community’s point of view. May Redfern talks to museum director Adrian Kerr about how that community is now telling its history
Although the Free Derry Museum formally opened in January 2007 and now welcomes around 15,000 visitors a year, there are already plans to expand. As Director Adrian Kerr explains: “It’s the impact on visitors that is important, more than just a headcount. The museum is doing what we set out to do, which is to give this community’s story of what happened within this community.”
The Free Derry Museum sits in the heart of the Bogside area of Derry, close to the Bloody Sunday Monument and Free Derry Corner. It is surrounded by a series of murals by the Bogside artists, which tell the story of the conflict in graphic form and is now a popular area with tourists. This was where, on the 30 January 1972, 14 people were shot dead by the Parachute Regiment as around 15,000 people took part in a civil rights march through the city. The museum building holds the last remaining physical evidence of Bloody Sunday in the area: two bullet strikes on the face of the building (and the subject of a preservation order laid down by the Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday, which is due to be handed over to government in March 2010: the most expensive public investigation in British legal history). With displays originating from a temporary exhibition on Bloody Sunday, which had been housed for several years in other centres, the Museum was established by the Bloody Sunday Trust and formally opened in January 2007.
Museum as campaigner
Adrian Kerr, the Museum’s Director explains that: “the plan was always to tell Bloody Sunday in context. You can’t tell it as a day, you need to explain the lead up to it, show where it came from, show the circumstances that created it.
“It is a very famous story but it has always been told from the other point of view. It is like only telling Hillsborough from the police point of view. You need to tell the story of the people it impacted most on. The people who were directly involved in it. As a measure of how directly we tell this story, three of us work in this museum, two lost brothers on Bloody Sunday. And most of the management committee were also directly involved either by family or organisers. We are a campaigning organisation that has built a museum as part of the campaign.” The establishment of the museum by the Bloody Sunday Trust was done so with the explicit intention of sharing the story of Bloody Sunday and civil rights from the local community’s point of view. “The museum enables us to show that our history is as important as everyone else’s. Museums tell history. Maybe it is a two edged sword but by deciding to have a museum we are putting our history in its proper place. We are not hiding our history. We are not ashamed of it.”
Members of the local community donated most of the objects to the museum: a handkerchief, a banner and a receipt from a petrol station all serve to illustrate their story. As Kerr explains: “The powerful thing about the objects we have on display is that they all came from within the community: we couldn’t live without that level of community support. It is amazing what people kept and preserved over the years. And there is new stuff coming in all the time. The blood stained banner and Bishop Daly’s handkerchief are iconic items related to the conflict in the North. The photo of Bishop Daly waving the white handkerchief is like the North’s version of the photo of Kim Phúk (who was seen running badly burnt from a napalm attack in Vietnam in 1972). People all over the world who don’t know much about the conflict in the North will recognise that photograph of Bishop Daly. They might not be able to tell you exactly what it is but it will be a photograph they’ve seen. So to actually have that handkerchief in the museum is awesome. But even down to the smaller stuff like the receipt for the petrol for the petrol bombs for the Battle of the Bogside. I remember coming across that in a case full of documents. It is absolutely amazing that that’s survived. People think it is amazing that there was a receipt in the first place.”
And how can the success of the museum and campaign for civil rights be measured? Kerr says: “It will be a success when what is in the museum is history, not current affairs. That is making me sound like a fucking politician. What we are dealing with, to be honest, it isn’t history yet. Speaking from a purely museum point of view it is a unique experience when your subject and your audience are the same people. In how many museums can your key player actually walk in and tell you whether you are right or wrong?”
Contested history
Meanwhile, over at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, part of National Museums Northern Ireland, a new Troubles gallery opened recently as part of a £17.2 million redevelopment. Although this display is in effect ‘neutral space’, Kerr has doubts about the use of such a display: “The Ulster Museum will do an absolutely fantastic and probably very expensive job in recounting the facts and figures about the conflict. But there is a justice and reconciliation aspect to museums like that, that can only be achieved from the bottom up. Not from the top down. You know what I would love to see is a range of museums like this, across the North. With the important criteria being that they are telling the stories that need to be told. But they have to be told by the people whose story you’re telling. And if possible on the site.
“We are in this building for a very specific reason. It is right in the centre of the killing zone from Bloody Sunday. It is central to so many of the key issues that we tell in the museum. It gives it that much greater strength. It is very evident when we’re working with school groups. You can explain the story…when John (a member of staff at the museum whose Brother was killed on Bloody Sunday) starts explaining the story and he introduces who he is it becomes very personal. It is not like it is academic history anymore as it is very personal. When you bring the group out, literally outside the door and go, right what we are talking about, that was here. And here, and here. You are standing right on the spot.
“We have had a lot of people and we do get a lot of people in here who would disagree with what we are saying. There is such a diverse range of perception of history in the North. And that is always going to cause conflict. There is also an idea from the great and the good that we shouldn’t be here with our recent history until we can come up with some sort of agreed, compromised version of it. That is never going to happen. And we shouldn’t even be trying to make it happen. It is revisionism at its worst. It is tainted history. So what we should be aiming for is a point where we understand and acknowledge the different perceptions and they become something that we can discuss, rather than fight about. But to get to that point we need to know what they all are. So we are doing it in this area, but we need others to do the same. But the fact that they really aren’t yet is the problem. We are trying to act as an encouragement to other people.
“About two or three years ago in the local press, a Loyalist spokesman from Derry mentioned this museum and said, well when is someone going to come and build a museum to our history? That is the problem. We didn’t wait for someone to come and build us a museum. We built it ourselves. Again this has to come from within the community. It has to grow from the ground up. We can’t have the government coming and saying right, we are going to build a museum on the history of a specific area - it has to be the people from that area doing it themselves.”
So does the Free Derry Museum suffer from an image problem, given that not everyone agrees with the history presented in the displays? Kerr acknowledges that: “There is an image problem with the museum. It can be seen by many as being a Republican museum, something that is party political, something that is dealing in propaganda. Yet nobody that has ever actually been to the museum has left with that impression. It is a museum about civil rights. People come and see it for the place that it actually is.
“The museum changes people’s perception. Take for example, the first state school visit to the museum. Although state schools in the North would be seen mainly as Protestant, they are officially non-denominational, but you’ve got the Catholic maintained schools and then the state schools and in an over-generalised way that is the Protestant-Catholic division in schools. The first state school to come up, we were suggested because one of the teachers was local and when he went back to the school and suggested it which led to a serious amount of opposition to even considering bringing the school here. One of the teachers was quite honest with us when he came to the museum: he had totally opposed bringing their group here. Yet he was booking a return visit as he left the museum. And they have been back again since. So when people actually come here they find out what the museum is really about. It is a completely independent museum; we are totally not party political. Obviously we all have our own views, but it is a civil rights museum.”
What about the views of the museums profession in the UK? “We get ignored by parts of the museum profession because we are doing something different from what they want to do. You know, we are the upstart in the museum world. This idea that we have to have an agreed history that we can have an agreed history, it is just crap. It won’t happen. To reach that you have to take parts of people’s history away from them. You can’t do that. Again, we are back to that fact that we are dealing with people and families and stories that are still here. We are not looking at the Siege, or the Fire of London. People are still around. We are dealing with a current issue. It is a totally different dynamic.”
A global perspective
Although the museum is explicitly linked to its locality, the wider theme of conflict and pursuit of justice are also global concerns. Whilst attending an International Sites of Conscience conference in Berlin last year, Kerr identified the uniqueness of the Free Derry Museum’s position as a campaigning organisation: “In one of the small discussions we were talking about how we actually tackle subjects and you could see that within the room and within the whole group that was there, those of us who were dealing with on-going issues - which is ourselves, the Basque country and Catalonia - had a completely different way of dealing with things.
"There were museums there that were dealing mainly with Second World War issues. The house where the Wannsee conference was held (now a Holocaust museum, where in 1942 the Nazis planned the final solution) they are dealing with issues where they are history. Most of the people involved are now dead. Whereas the three of us are dealing with issues that are still part of daily life, so we have a different way of doing things, we tend to have a much more direct approach. We are not just dealing with history, we are dealing with current issues that we are trying to impact on and tell about. It just leads to a completely different approach.
“One of the key aims of the Sites of Conscience is how we use the stories within our sites to impact on current issues. The Holocaust museums in Europe that are part of Sites of Conscience use the Holocaust to look at racism in modern day Europe, a very important thing for them in making the link with justice in the past and how it can be dealt with or how it is showing itself again in the present. It is never a case of looking and saying, this happened x years ago. It is always well, what can we learn for now? What are the links between then and now? What are the similarities with what is happening around the world?”
Future plans
Back in Derry, there are plans to expand the museum, giving 30 per cent more exhibition space together with an improved reception area on the ground floor. A new first floor extension will provide classroom space together with a research area and access to the archive. This has been designed to be flexible, so that it can turn into a 150-seated conference area if needed.
Kerr also wants a reflective area. “This museum can have a very, very, very serious impact on the people who visit. So we want to provide a space where people can actually go afterwards and sit and chat. Maybe there will be some extra reading material. And just reflect on what they’ve just seen in the museum, what they’ve read and what they’ve learnt. I think this museum and museums like this can be very therapeutic for communities. You know you have to be able to tell your own story. And you need people to come and understand it and acknowledge it. So the actual setting up of the museum and the fact that it is here is cathartic certainly for this community but I think even wider than that. Working on your own story and analysing your own story and coming to fully understanding – looking at all the different parts because everybody would have grown up with their own small section of it – just because you grew up in the Bogside doesn’t mean you know everything that happened on the Bogside. So maybe seeing it – broadening it out slightly – gives you a bit more perspective just than your own experiences as well.
“I am working on the fundraising campaign for our expansion plans at the moment. It is going to cost us about a million and a half. We want to build a public space at the back as well, not like a graveyard but a public memorial space, some sort of external reflective area. At the top you will look out to Free Derry Corner, at the top of the stairs you are looking straight across to the memorial. So it is bringing all those into the museum. It means we can do the work we really want to do, which is an improvement on what we are doing at the moment.”
May Redfern
Museum Consultant
